There is one dark lobster at the bottom of the trap. Hut Father catches him just back of his wide-flung big claws and sawing “smellers” and throws him far out in the waves, The lobster is a shade too short to “go.” Father would know it by the lobster's heft even in the pitch dark. He doesn' t need to pull out the measuring iron that bulges out the port pocket in his rear pants. He wears that iron for looks and the law. He never has to wet it. That is what it is to have a father who is an artist, and Peter swells with pride.
They bait up the trap. Uncle Timothy hands Father the rotting fish the lobsters love. Father strings them through their middles near the backbone and makes a loop in them by threading his needle through their wide mouths. When his string is heavy with the fish, he threads his iron needle up through the top slats, takes two quick turns around the bait-button, slams the latticed door of the trap to, buttons it with the two wooden buttons, douses the trap back with a smack into the sea. He seizes the buoy by its standing stick, throws it out a good way, paying the line through his left fist as the line sings out after the buoy, he catches up the loops of warp, each just where he has laid it coming in, and slats each loop overboard, clears the rail with his bourbon bottle, douses over the last loop of warp. He nods to Timothy, Timothy tickles the carburetor, straddles a big straddle in his vast pants, spins the flywheel in his huge hands. The engine “catches” and coughs, begins to chug in a blue fog, works up to its rhythm, levels out to work, and they putt-putt off to the next spindle wabbling in the air on the next buoy.
The second trap has three “counts” in it, and not a single crab. That's the way life runs, famine or a feast. And two kinds of horny sea-crawlers do not like to keep company. One of the lobsters is a five-pound dragon of the deep, with a paper-hanger's big shears waving the air and opening and shutting fiercely. Without bothering to look Father puts his hand right down between the living shears and picks the big fellow up with thumb and first finger on each side of his back shell just behind its dimples. The green dragon tries his best to arch his claws back and cut Father's wrists off, his clubbed clam-crusher and the sharp and thin clam-digger try to get home in the man, but they miss by a split hair each chop they make at Father. Father's fingers deftly shove home the white-pine plug from his pants pocket right at the base of each open claw, the claws close for good, and the lobster's biting days are done. He drops harmlessly from Father's hand into the boat and spanks the planking with his flanged tail with belated hate, and scares the wits out of the clustered crabs and semis them scattering bow and aft.
They pick up every last one of the three hundred traps and bring up opposite home at half flood tide, stepping out in the same tracks they left when they got into the boat on the half ebb, with the sun just on the tips, of the dark spruces back of their house and the peepers beginning to tune up for their night-long shouts of love in the darkening marsh. The new boat's bottom is dark with plugged dragons. The lobstermen stand ankle-deep in them without breaking as much as the smallest claw. They load their baskets up. And they are all for home and the stew kettle.
The dish of May is lobster stew. After the family lobster-cars are tilled with the hundreds of captives that mean, each last one of them, a new dollar in the family till, Father takes the two dozen lusty chicken lobsters he has saved out up to the house in a pail half full of their own Atlantic. He takes them up before their spunk has gone out of them, unplugged and temperamental as wrestling boys. And Peter beats him into the kitchen and has the kettle on the open lid of the stove by the time Father gets in. Mother has already breezed up a fire with spruce twigs and bitch chips the minute she heard the male voices, which carry a long way on a clear May night, down at the farm's port. Father pours in the young dragons, all stitched together by their claws, with just a cupful of their Atlantic to start the steam, and claps the kettle cover on before the lobsters know what is up. In an instant hell begins to break loose in this kettle on this brisk fire. The lobsters leave off biting one another and smite the iron walls of their new prison with flapping tails. But their agony is brief. Peace and steam fill the kettle.
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